I actually love the, "McCain is another four years of Bush," rhetoric for a simple reason: It's as annoying and meaningless as saying that Democrats spend a lot of money on things. It has that same stupid smack, it's great. So I'm going to keep saying it. You're not that heavily a Republican these days, Spo (at least, it seems you're more moderate/independent), so it shouldn't really affect you other than the sensible person in you wondering what makes people repeat such stupid rhetoric. The people it should bother are going to get angry and make asses of themselves instead of making valid points. The following is not for you, it's for people who claim to be Republicans/fiscally conservative and want to vote for McCain.

He's proposing his own tax cuts - tons of them aimed at all levels of income. Sounds great. The problem is we have a crazy deficit that he's planning to balance out of the budget by 2013 so you can't just say, "I'm going to cut taxes for everyone!" and then actually do it without something to back that up. It's good that you mentioned earmarks, Spo, because it's something McCain touches on a lot when he talks about his fiscal plans. All kinds of money is earmarked for all kinds of crazy stuff by the government for things which probably aren't going to help in comparison to the amount being spent on them. Sounds like we will be cutting out a lot of those, "pork-barrel," dollars from the US budget. Here's the problem:

Deficit: What, like $9 trillion?
FY08 Earmarks: $17 billion.

So, unfortunately, the earmark cry is a placebo - most people just won't go to the Office of Management and Budget site to check that they're being fed sugar. Something else that McCain has talked about a lot is not borrowing from those foreign folks but if we lower taxes we have to pay for things still and I get the nagging feeling that $17 billion isn't going to cover a FY09 budget, even if it's slashed in half from FY08 because:

FY08 Budget: Somewhere around $3 trillion?

NOW! Let's say proposed earmarks go up exponentially each year - FY08 was $17 billion, so we'll say that FY09 will be $34b, FY10 $68b, and FY11 $136b. That's a little over $255 billion in four years. $1.5 trillion in 09... say he stays the course for all four years on that same amount (impossible). Still a huge difference there.

So what's McCain's other answer?

The McCain administration would reserve all savings from victory in the Iraq and Afghanistan operations in the fight against Islamic extremists for reducing the deficit. Since all their costs were financed with deficit spending, all their savings must go to deficit reduction.

McCain hasn't defined what he means by victory but I would assume we're talking about our troops not being needed there any more, since to pull them out now (even with Iraq bugging the shit out of us to leave) means failure/forfeiture. So the money wouldn't even materialize until the proposed withdrawal date of 2011 (this is Iraq's proposed date). And even then, the Iraq war is quickly approaching the $600 billion mark in cost to us. It's gone up like $100b a year or something like that. Both candidates have proposed using money from the Iraq/Afghanistan situations to pay for things, but even that isn't a whole lot of money in terms of the fiscal year budgets and the deficit. The numbers aren't there to back up all this stuff that John McCain wants to do. So even if he vetoes every bill that comes across his desk with earmarks (and don't read me wrong here - I would love that) it isn't enough. Things like the Gas Holiday, focusing on small businesses, changing Social Security, etc. are small pins on a huge corkboard when you're promising to help pay for job transitions, lowering healthcare costs for seniors, etc.

The same goes for Barack Obama: the money isn't there and it won't be there. The key thing is that Bush royally screwed us (man, I am SO glad I didn't vote for him). Does what I'm saying make sense? Neither candidate is a vote for fiscal responsibility. The proposed "change" that McCain has adopted comes in fixing the Republican party by not voting for them. It doesn't mean you have to vote for Obama or Nader or whoever. Just don't vote for McCain. Do you guys remember the 2000 election? The running joke then was how much the candidates agreed upon. It was a close election that could have ended either way because we had a balanced budget and a fiscal surplus - the economy wasn't this albatross in 2000. So people voted on ideological things, where the country is split down the middle. In 2004, we were still scared by 9/11 and let the Republicans talk us into believing that Democrats would be soft on war (and John Kerry was a dingbat).

This time, the economy is the huge thing but both candidates are a bunk vote in that arena. What do we fall back on in that case? Ideology. Except that a huge majority of Americans are for removing our troops from Iraq regardless of a victory and they don't care about scare tactics any more. Americans are hearing the following from the parties:

Republicans: Money blah blah, education blah blah, environment blah blah, 9/11, terrorists, stay in Iraq, Al Qaida.
Democrats:: Money blah blah, education blah blah, environment blah blah, get out of Iraq.

Tell me who is going to win.

Now, if you want to debate whether that's a smart way to vote, I'm all for that discussion.

EDIT: Side note - the comment about the Nuge and naughty librarians - clearly, I know you're not going to vote for someone based on those criteria but I just wanted to mention that it's as silly a reason for liking a candidate as my, "Bill Clinton got a BJ in the White House!" bullshit.